Recently, it has become quite popular to provide filters which produce effects on images similar to popular artistic painting styles. These filters are designed to take an image and produce a resultant secondary image which appears to be an artistic rendition of the primary image in one of the artistic styles.
One extremely popular artist in modern times was Vincent van Gogh. It is a characteristic of art works produced by this artist that the direction of brush strokes in flat areas of his paintings strongly follow the direction of edges of dominant features in the painting. For example, his works entitled “Road with Cypress and Star”, “Starry Night” and “Portrait of Doctor Gachet” are illustrative examples of this process.
It would be desirable to provide a computer algorithm which can automatically produce a “van Gogh” effect on an arbitrary input image.